Category Archives: Biology

Every day we hear about the destruction that we, as a species, do to our planet. The pockets of wilderness that still exist on our planet are becoming smaller and smaller, and as they continue to shrink it can be easy to become increasingly cynical and hopeless about our chances of protecting it.

However, every now and again a set of images are produced that remind us of the intricate beauty of nature and that it is worth conserving. The U.S. Geological Society has recently released a set of images that do exactly that.

The pictures were originally taken to show the changes that happen to our planet over time, but when the team starting taking them, they adapted their motives. Rather than mapping changes, they simply took images that highlighted the complex beauty of Earth from the air.

The full list of images can be seen here. However, we picked our favourite four that show that our planet is worth fighting for.

Great Sandy Desert, Australia

The yellow of the dunes is a beautiful juxtaposition with the red that indicates forest fires that had scorched the grass and forest at the time the picture was taken.

The mix of colours in the rest of the image are different forms of geological formations.

Tanezrouft Basin, Algeria

Taken over a desolate area of the Sahara Desert, the striking colours of the sand dunes and sandstone formations are the only features in a landscape that don’t hold a drop of water. Continue reading →

Alfred Bowman, also known as Dr. Sebi, has passed over in Honduras. Though it may have indeed been an intentional murder to silence this great healer of holistic medicine, what I wish to focus on is Dr. Sebi’s accomplishments so that his knowledge spreads to even more people on how to take health and healing into one’s own hands.

Takes On The FDA and Wins

In 1985 Dr. Sebi placed an ad in three different newspapers which read:

“Aids has been cured by the Usha Research Institute, and we specialize in cures for Sickle Cell, Lupus, Blindness, Herpes, Cancer and others.”

The ad was running still 2 years later until the New York Attorney General served Dr. Sebi with an arrest warrant. In court, Dr. Sebi was charged with practicing medicine without a license, selling products not approved by the FDA, and claiming to cure AIDS and other diseases, which was seen by the court as a fraudulent claim.

Dr. Sebi was asked to bring one person to court as proof for every disease he claimed to cure. He ended up bringing in over 70 patients as his living proof and Dr. Sebi was dismissed after the judge spoke more in-depth with Sebi and the patients.

Dr. Sebi’s Philosophy and Methods

Dr. Sebi, a pathologist, herbalist, biochemist and naturalist, believed that the root of all disease was excessive mucous–that the mucous was the effect of an out of balance biochemical state within the body. Continue reading →

This amazing planet is filled with creatures, critters, and all sorts of crazy-looking beings- many of which we haven’t even discovered. In fact, there are over 1,367,555 non-insect animals that have been identified, and that number represents only 1% of all animal species that have ever lived! All over the world, we come across the most beautiful animals…and the creepiest ones as well.

The following 12 animals are almost unheard of; join us as we discover what lies beyond their hidden mystery.

The pangolin is a solitary mammal. They are nocturnal, and will either sleep in burrows or trees during the day.

They basically look like a scaly anteater, and their diet consists of a variety of insects and insect larva. The body of a pangolin is covered with scales, which are made of keratin- the same protien that forms fingernails and human hair. Even though you might not have heard of the pangolin, they are the most illegally-trafficked animal, and have been poached to near-extinction.

No, that’s not an alien facehugger coming out of that creature’s mouth, that’s actually it’s nose.

The star-nosed mole has a nose only half an inch in length, but it holds over 25,000 mechanoreceptors, called Eimer’s organs, which give it an incredible sense of smell. In fact, this animal has the most sensitive nose in the entire animal kingdom. Which comes in handy because it is nearly blind, and hunts most of it’s prey underground. Continue reading →

Is there really a magic bullet for anxiety? Could a simple pill be the answer to your nervous jitteriness? Some anecdotal evidence suggests that it could – for some people.

Humans as a species evolved to eat a diverse menu of foods that were packed full with vitamins and minerals. There was no fast food, no grocery stores and no high fructose corn syrup over evolutionary time. Our foods contained copious amounts of niacin, or vitamin b-3 as most people know it.

Pellagra is a disease caused by severe lack of niacin and tryptophan. Its symptoms are mainly diarrhea, dermatitis and dementia – the three D’s. The recommended dietary intake of niacin (~20 mg) is just enough to stop most people from getting the symptoms of pellagra. But is it enough to keep us healthy and vibrant?

There is not much clinical research being done on niacin’s effect on anxiety – maybe because there is not much money in it. But there is some promising anecdotal evidence for its potency.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the health and consciousness promoting supplement being talked and written about in the holistic health community called fulvic acid. One of the foremost experts in organic soil science is Dr. William Jackson, said, “If the Creator felt that it was necessary to design something to solve multiple problems, and if this Creator wanted to show us the magic and miracle of pulling ‘rabbits from a hat,’ then an outstanding job was done with the design of fulvic acid. ”

Fulvic acids are created by soil-based microorganisms to help make nutrients available to the roots of the plant to uptake and utilize.

Fulvic acid has 14,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons it can donate.

Interestingly, it can both donate and accept electrons- something no other compound is known to be able to accomplish.

According to Supreme Fulvic, fulvic acids are also the richest source of electrolytes, helps to chelate metallic minerals (and transmute them into bioavailable forms), helps with vitamin and mineral transportation and absorption, catalyzes enzymatic activity and helps dramatically with neutralizing radioactive substances within the body as well as catalyzing the breakdown and elimination of herbicides and pesticides. Continue reading →

“Some of the best advice you’ll ever get will come from your gut instinct”.

We’ve all heard expressions about trusting our gut and following our instincts, but now, science is finally giving us the evidence to support it.

Dubbed “The Second Brain” by Michael Gershon, Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. The network of neurons that line our guts are filled with (over 100 million) neurotransmitters which to put it simply, do a lot more than simply digest our food.

What Gershon found is that the enteric nervous system directly connects to the larger central system at the base of the skull, that assists in feeding information to our brains through the hypothalamus and pituitary, known as the Gut Brain Axis. This information exchange than helps to determine our mental state, as well as “playing a crucial role when it comes to disease in the body.”

While this second brain has not been proven to formulate its own conscious thought, nor play any major role in our decision-making process, “The system is way too complicated to have evolved only to make sure things move out of your colon,” says Emeran Mayer, professor of physiology, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.).

This second brain plays a large role in our emotional well-being and instinctual motives as it is now being discovered that “a big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut,”Mayer adds.

Butterflies in the stomach are a sign of physiological distress felt by this system, and sensed by the huge amount of neurotransmitters (more than the number found in the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous systems).

Since this amazing discovery, it is becoming more clear that our emotional well-being has a direct relation to our physiology. When we are stressed, anxious or nervous, there is a concurrent exchange of information being translated between our minds and our guts, which can be speculated as a probable cause in diabetes, obesity and stubborn belly fat.

This incredible research comes pursuant of one of the most well-known scientists in his field Mark Lyte, of Texas Tech University Health Sciences. 30 years ago Lyte began his career long journey seeking to prove that “gut microbes communicate with the nervous system using some of the same neurochemicals that relay messages in the brain”. Lyte proposed that there was a connection between our mental state or mood and the bacteria found in the gut.

In 2007, it was announced that the scientific community would be launching a “Human Microbiome project, that would catalog all micro-organisms living in the body through a series of testing and since then biologist are understanding more and more that much of what makes us human, depends largely on the microbial activity within our bodies.

There are over two million unique bacterial genes found in each human microbiome that make the mere 23,000 genes in our cells seem insignificant by comparison ‘‘It has enormous implications for the sense of self,’’ Tom Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, told The New York Times. ‘‘We are, at least from the standpoint of DNA, more microbial than human. ”

These microbial in our gut, secrete chemicals and Lyte has found that “among those chemicals are the same substances used by our neurons to communicate and regulate mood, like dopamine, serotonin and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA).”